Dr Geoffrey Hinton: AI pioneer gives warning as he resigns from Google

An AI pioneer, Dr Geoffrey Hinton, 75, on resigning from Google, has given a stark warning about the power of the technology he helped to create.

Geoffrey Hinton, in excerpts from an interview published in the New York Times yesterday, May 1, warned of the growing danger that advances in artificial intelligence (AI) technology poses for the world.

The New York Times posted on Twitter: “Geoffrey Hinton, an AI pioneer, quit his job at Google, where he has worked for more than a decade, so he can freely speak out about the risks posed by AI. “It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things,” he said.”

Geoffrey Hinton, an AI pioneer, quit his job at Google, where he has worked for more than decade, so he can freely speak out about the risks posed by AI. “It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things,” he said. https://t.co/DJ9m6ilgvi pic.twitter.com/ZwtCMEQGrb

— The New York Times (@nytimes) May 1, 2023

The pioneering cognitive psychologist and computer scientist was a front-runner in the development of neural networks and deep learning technologies that power chatbot systems like ChatGPT.

Having described chatbots as: “quite scary,” when talking to the BBC, he went on to say: “Right now, they’re not more intelligent than us, as far as I can tell. But I think they soon may be.”

Speaking to the New York Times, Dr Hinton’s biggest fear for AI technology it would seem was that: “It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things.”

He went on to describe how AI could work to the detriment of its creators in the wrong hands, although adding that this would be a worst-case scenario.

The technology might be allowed by a ‘bad actor’ to create its own sub-goals such as in Dr Hinton’s example, where the machine might look to ‘get more power’. In this case, a digital machine could ruthlessly pursue its goal, without the consideration of moral duty that we would hope most humans would exhibit.

Further problems of giving ‘intelligent’ machines this type of autonomy would be that they would self-improve to the point at which humankind would lose control of them.

In March this year, an open letter signed by world leaders in the AI field, including Tesla and Space X boss Elon Musk, called for AI developers to take a step back and consider the ramifications of this exciting but potentially dangerous technology.